As mentioned in my previous column, it was former Stanford University track coach Payton Jordan who put me in touch with Lou Zamperini about 20 years ago.

Having just read Zamperini’s personal story in “Devil at My Heels” in which he describes being lost on two small rafts in the largest ocean in the world for a month-and-a-half, then the brutal captivity he experienced for another two years, I wanted to find out if he might still be alive.

I called my friend Jordan, who had been his teammate on USC’s national championship track team back in 1939. Jordan’s immediate answer was even better than I expected, “Louie — sure, he’s a good friend of mine. I can give you his phone number if you want it.”

If I wanted it? Holy smoke, what luck! From that point on, a couple of phone calls, numerous letters and actually meeting the war hero twice made him my friend, too. Jordan also furnished additional information about his former teammate.

“He broke an arm skateboarding when he was 78 — got a wheel caught in streetcar tracks, and he’s a real daredevil on skis,” Jordan said.

Then Jordan added that when the Trojan track team went back East for the national meet, the coach left him behind to bring Zamperini and make sure he stayed out of trouble before they got to New York.

Courting trouble — how’s this? Previously, when Zamperini qualified for the Berlin Olympics in 1936, he climbed on top of the Olympic village roof and took down the Nazi flag. Caught by a policeman and arrested, Zamperini managed to talk the authorities into letting him keep the flag.

“I still have it,” he told me when he was 81.

The film “Unbroken” shows him running in the Olympic 5,000 meter race but doesn’t fully depict his furious final lap (in 56 seconds) that brought him up from last to eighth. Even Adolph Hitler congratulated him.

As Zamperini put it, “That’s hardly an honor, but how many people are around today who ever shook hands with the guy?”

As a runner, I feel Lou Zamperini must have been a “natural.” His 4:21 national high school mile record and a later 4:08.6 mile time at USC (when the world record was 4:06.4) were all done when most American coaches had no idea how to really train distance runners.

And as a runner myself, having been in many 5,000-meter races, I can assure you, to circle a 440 yard track in 56 seconds after having already completed 11½ hard running laps sounds almost superhuman to me.

That same kind of gutty determination may have helped him survive those long, long days on the raft and seemingly endless months of brutality as a wartime POW.

Violent police encounters in California last year led to the deaths of 157 people and six officers, the state attorney general’s office said Thursday in a report that provides the first statewide tally on police use-of-force incidents.